12/20

i'm thankful for the way that our hangout conversation yesterday prompted me to think about the things i like about our new support software. i'm thankful that some of the things i like are caused by flaws or weaknesses—i'm thankful it forces you to manually refresh tabs and lists to see email updates from the customer, which is annoying and clunky and ridiculous in one respect but also an aid to focus that our old software, which was constantly twitching and pinging out a stream of AJAX request updates, didn't provide. i'm thankful for my coworker's dog, who kept snoring loudly in the background of our conversation. i'm thankful that at one point she turned her computer to show him lying on the couch, his head hanging out over the edge of the cushion. i'm thankful that another coworker in upstate new york, in response to a question about the texture of the snow there from a coworker in LA, carried her computer outside and crunched into the snow so we could hear the texture. i'm thankful that the day went by very quickly and suddenly it was after 6 without me even realizing it.

i'm thankful that my parents mailed d and i christmas presents, including one we got to open right away, which is a bag of my mom's homemade granola which d really loves. i'm thankful to be basically done with christmas shopping, even if i want to get a few more things for d—i'm thankful that since she's gotten other presents of mine early, she won't mind getting a few late as well. i'm thankful that even though i'm not going home for christmas, my brother will be, which i know is important to my mom. i'm thankful for this gift i got for my brother, which would have been our dream gift as children. i'm thankful to have gotten he and my dad a collection of houdini's writings published by melville house.

i'm thankful for this book, which is very funny so far (i'm thankful for the moment when the narrator, frustrated, writes, "There was nothing I could do but walk into the kitchen and drive a fruit knife into the back of my hand" which i feel really captures how we're all feeling these days). i'm thankful for this excellent interview with the excellent ruth curry (i'm thankful for her conceptualization of "the blurring of fiction and nonfiction and how important that is as a feminist enterprise because we’ve been told our whole lives that what happens to us doesn’t matter, it’s not art, our stories are boring, they’re not worthy," which is a way i'd never thought about that before). i'm thankful there are other people who hate the fiction issues of publications as much as i do.

i'm thankful, at a plateau in terraria, to have opened a free trial of playstation now on my vita and found that the latency is quite good and playable. i'm thankful that there are many games for me to play, including catherine, which is one of d and i's favorite games that we've played together. i'm thankful for youtube speedruns. i'm thankful for these grotesque interfaces. i'm thankful for "when u dropped ur phone charger outside the night before a snowstorm but you know exactly where it is and u r a fox." i'm thankful for taco bell.